■ Costa Coffee owner Whitbread has offered to buy Eastern European coffee shop operator CoffeeHeaven for about £36m.
■ National Express has received 90.47 per cent acceptances for its £360m rights issue, the bus and trains operator confirmed Tuesday.
■ A return to sales growth in the UK & Ireland helped carpets and floor coverings group Carpetright increase pre-tax profit by 16 per cent and double the dividend ().
■ Serco is confident enough about prospects to repeat forecasts for 2009 ahead of meetings with analysts prior to its financial year end on 31 December.
■ VT Group has tried again to get bosses at Mouchel into talks about a possible bid for the road and infrastructure support contractor valued at 250p a share.
■ Design and engineering consultancy Scott Wilson reported a 5 per cent decline in adjusted pre-tax profit but while UK markets remain weak, it expects growth in its international markets ().
■ Shares in British Airways drifted lower as the embattled airline said it is mulling "all options" to cope with the planned 12-day strike by cabin crew over the Christmas period ().
Continues below...
■ Kraft Food today responded to Cadbury's defence against the American food giant's hostile takeover attempt, saying it has 'heard nothing from Cadbury that surprises us.'
■ State-owned lender Northern Rock has announced its new board structure ahead of its split into a 'good bank' and 'bad bank' on 1 January.
■ Royal Bank of Scotland chairman Philip Hampton today insisted the lender needed to pay 'commercial' bonuses to reward staff, but denied reports that the board threatened to walk out over government limits to pay-outs.
■ Fabrics producer Fiberweb said it expects full-year results to come in better than previously expected, as sales to medical and construction markets pick up.
■ Lloyd List publisher and exhibitions group Informa is still on track to hit forecasts this year.
■ Bus and train group Go-Ahead expects interim profits from its rail business to halve though its bus business is doing better.
■ Credit lender International Personal Finance (IPF) anticipates that full-year results will slightly exceed expectations.
■ Business advisory firm Tenon said it remains confident that trading for the full year will be in-line with company expectations.
■ Bingo and gaming group Rank is to demand repayment of nearly £26m of VAT after a tribunal again ruled it had been overcharged tax on gaming machines between 2003 and 2005.
■ Social housing firm Connaught said it is performing in-line with expectations, with new contract wins of £312m and a record pipeline of £4.5bn.
■ Recruitment company Robert Walters now expects to achieve break-even or a small profit before tax for 2009.
FOR A SUMMARY OF LATEST MOVEMENTS IN EQUITY, COMMODITY AND CURRENCY MARKETS, SEE FT.COM'S MARKETS PAGE
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NEWSPAPER SHARE TIPS (13 DEC 2009):
Full round-up of newspaper share tips (sourced from Sharecast)
NEWSPAPER SHARE TIPS (15 DEC 2009):
Full round-up of newspaper share tips (sourced from Sharecast)
PRESS HEADLINES:
Almost one million air passengers face travel chaos over Christmas after British Airways cabin crew voted for a 12-day strike starting on December 22.
The dispute, which will cost the loss-making BA hundreds of millions of pounds, threatens to intensify, with unions planning more mass walkouts. Unite won overwhelming support for the strike over changes it says have been imposed, including the reduction of one crew member on all flights, the Times reports.
The European Union yesterday gave the green light to the Government's bail-out of the Royal Bank of Scotland, described as Europe's biggest ever state handout to a private company. European Commission officials said that the support and restructuring plan for RBS, which it calculated at £60bn to £100bn, was the largest government subsidy in 52 years of EU competition policy, the Telegraph reports.
The Government is expected to extend the scope of its controversial banker bonus tax to ensure that the City house of N M Rothschild and other banks with non-standard year-ends do not slip through the net, The Times has learnt. Rothschild, which has operated in the heart of the City for two centuries, had been set to avoid the tax because, unusually among UK investment banks, it pays its annual bonuses in June, two months after the temporary tax is due to end on April 5 next year.
Alistair Darling has warned banks that he will not water down his 50 per cent supertax on bonuses or offer special deals in a standoff in which brokers and banks have threatened to move key staff out of the UK. The chancellor has been deluged with claims by banks that the tax would raise far more than the £550m he predicted. They have demanded that he make the levy less onerous, the FT reports.
The fallout from the Government's controversial bonus tax was felt in earnest yesterday as one of the Square Mile's biggest trading companies paved the way for its staff to move abroad to more attractive tax regimes. Tullett Prebon, an interdealer broker, has offered employees the chance to move to one of its overseas offices days after Alistair Darling announced the 50 per cent "supertax" on bank bonuses in his pre-Budget report, the Independent reports.
Google has secretly developed a new mobile phone that it hopes will challenge the iPhone's dominance of the lucrative smartphone market. The phone, code-named Nexus One, is already being tested by external mobile phone experts and it is expected to go on sale early next year. A person who has seen the phone told The Daily Telegraph said it was a "huge leap forward" from current crop of smartphones including the iPhone.
Meanwhile, the introduction of next generation mobile phones into the UK has hit a "significant" hitch after it emerged that people who use the state-of-the-art devices at home may stop their televisions working, or even those next door. The Government is in the process of switching the country from analogue television signals to digital by 2012, the Independent reports.
Unilever was expected last night to announce within hours the appointment of Jean-Marc Huet as its chief financial officer. Mr Huet yesterday announced his resignation as finance chief at Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS), the pharmaceutical company. He is expected to replace James Lawrence, who announced last Thursday that he was leaving Unilever. He had lost out on the chief executive's job to Paul Polman, and will leave the maker of Dove and Persil at the end of the year — the same time that Mr Huet will depart BMS, the Times reports.
Support for a global tax or emissions trading scheme for shipping and aviation is growing at the Copenhagen climate change talks, according to two sources close to European Union negotiators. If agreed at the tense Copenhagen summit, the money is likely to go towards a £100bn "climate aid" fund to help poorer states deal with global warming. Either a tax or emissions trading system specifically for these industries could provide up to a quarter of this amount, the Telegraph reports.
The seemingly inexhaustible demand for property meant that house prices continued to rise last month, despite a fresh supply of stock coming on to the housing market. The proportion of estate agents reporting an increase rather than a decrease in house prices was at its highest for three years, according to figures from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS). The figures show that 35 per cent of surveyors reported rising rather than falling prices in the past three months, up from 34 per cent in October and the highest quarterly reading since November 2006, the Times reports.
Participants in the auction that led to Terra Firma's disastrous £4bn acquisition of EMI are challenging the account of events set out in a lawsuit filed by the private equity firm against Citigroup. Guy Hands, Terra Firma's chairman, has alleged that the bank fraudulently misrepresented the position of other bidders on the eve of the bid deadline in the 2007 auction, knowing that they had dropped out but still encouraging him to make a 265p binding bid, the Times reports.
The Greek prime minister announced a crackdown on corruption and tight controls on spending on Monday but disappointed market-watchers expecting more decisive measures to reduce the budget deficit. George Papandreou told trade unionists and business groups that public sector workers would receive real wage rises next year in spite of Greece's deteriorating public finances, the FT reports.
BAE Systems has welcomed a decision by the Government Accountability Office, the US watchdog, in favour of the UK-based arms manufacturer after it protested against the award of a lucrative contract to a US competitor. The $3bn (£2.7bn) defence contract for the production of FMTVs, or Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles, was awarded to Oshkosh by the US Department of Army in a surprise decision in August, the FT reports.
